Turning a Personal Problem into a Healthcare Revolution Using AI: Akilesh Bapu's DeepScribe Story

In this episode, we sit down with Akilesh Bapu, CEO and co-founder of DeepScribe, the most widely adopted ambient documentation tool used in over a thousand organizations across the U.S. Akilesh takes us through his unconventional journey to entrepreneurship, from coding in middle school to tackling one of healthcare’s most persistent issues: physician burnout due to overwhelming documentation.DeepScribe began as a personal mission to solve his father’s time-consuming documentation struggles and has evolved into a transformative tool for clinicians nationwide. Akilesh shares how he navigated the startup world without a medical background, the power of building the right network, and why he believes the best time to start a company is now. From hackathons to healthcare, this conversation is packed with entrepreneurial insights, lessons on resilience, and the future of AI in medicine.Episode Quotes:On Finding His Entrepreneurial Spark: Akilesh reflects on his first hackathon experience and how it ignited his passion for creating solutions. I thought it was a joke that people would build something and release it by the end of the time frame that we were there, but we actually pulled it off. And not just us. Hundreds of other teams also did that, and it was just incredible to me to see that you could just come up with an idea, and then you could open your laptop, go heads down and code for 72 hours, and come up with something that people could actually use. It just blew my mind and I was super excited about continuing to double down on that.Embracing the Non-Medical Perspective: Akilesh talks about the benefits of bringing a tech-first perspective to the healthcare industry. One of the things my co-founder and I love to say is that we're not doctors, we’re not natively from medicine. And I think how that helps is we're able to bring in this outsider tech perspective and really rethink how these processes are done. So, whenever there is a process or a fact of truth that's shared with us, we naively would ask, why is this the case? Why do we need this? Just asking ‘why’ helped DeepScribe be successful early on when a lot of folks that were native to health care took that for granted. So, I think having that outsider perspective helps.Show Links:DeepScribeUC Berkeley SkyDeckThe House FundHackDFWBerkeley AI Research Lab (BAIR)